Category Archives: Sandia Report

I can come close to the day the propaganda war was launched to brand teachers 100% responsible for teaching and learning—a war that has left poverty, children and parents out of the equation. The day it started for me and the teachers I worked with was similar to the day Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan. It was a day that should live in infamy.

I was there. I heard it. I saw it along with the staff of an entire middle school.

It was the prestart of the 1987-88 school year a few days before the students arrived. The new principal, a tyrant, stood in front of his new staff—the district had forced him to transfer from the grade school where he wanted to stay to the middle school where I was teaching, and the district administration, that would have made Arne Duncan and Bill Gates proud, moved the previous principal, who was too caring of Children and supportive of us teachers, to another school.

The new tyrant stood there next to a flip chart on a stand, and he turned the pages one at a time. On each large page was an image and a caption. There was no Q & A session afterwards.

I don’t remember exactly what each large page said or what order they were in or how many there were, but the message is branded on my brain and here are the two that stand out the most.

If students are failing your classes, it’s your fault. You are not motivating them.

If students are misbehaving in your classes, it’s your fault. You can’t control them.

The tyrant made it clear that he wasn’t interested in what we thought. He also made it clear that he had a closed-door policy. If we had problems with students and parents, he wasn’t there to support us, and we had to solve the problems ourselves or quit. At the end of that school year about 50% of the teaching staff quit, retired early or transferred to other schools. I transferred to Nogales High School in the same district along with another English teacher.

Michelle Rhee was stamped from the same mold as that tyrant principal, and the district administrators who ran Rowland Unified back then were from that mold too.

During those years, I saw too many good and dedicated teachers quit, transfer or retire early to escape the constant blame game and stress that came from the top down and was always aimed at teachers. I also witnessed several principals lose their jobs who were too supportive of us teachers.

The planning for the war against the public schools and teachers started about the same time as the flawed and fraud of 1983’s A Nation at Risk, and Ronald Reagan was the president who introduced Milton Friedman’s trickle down economic policy as the financial law of the land that has made the richest 1% wealthier than at any time in U.S. History, increased poverty, and smashed the middle class with a sledge hammer of debt that starts with young adults who dare to dream and go to college.

If you doubt that Reagan’s A Nation at Risk was all a lie, I suggest you read 1990’s Sandia Report. “What we now call school reform isn’t the product of a gradual consensus emerging among educators about how kids learn; it’s a political movement that grew out of one seed planted in 1983.”

After 1987, teachers who failed too many students for not doing the work that led to learning were called in to the office on an annual basis and blamed for those failing grades, and we were asked what we were going to do to fix the problem. The blame for children not doing school work and studying shifted from students to teachers, and the few teachers who didn’t fail students were never called on the carpet to defend themselves.

In fact, two VP’s pulled me aside in the hall on two different occasions and warned me that the district administration was trying to figure out how to fire me. Both of these VP’s asked me if there was any way I could compromise and give the district what they wanted. That meant fewer failing grades for students who didn’t read, work or study. The district couldn’t attack me for low test scores, because my students had the highest gains in the district by a significant margin for the grade level I was teaching. In addition, a third VP in a department meeting said that those gains had been documented going back years—as long as the state had been using standardized tests to measure student growth.

In conclusion, the district administration never fired me—but I think they worked hard to make my job more difficult. I retired on my own terms at the end of 30 years in the classroom (1975-2005).

That outcome might have been different in today’s climate where any teacher can be made to look like a failure by the reformers, because they have support from the corporate owned media and have rigged the system with the Common Core standardized tests, and that’s not counting the support of not only the last two Presidents of the United States, but several state governors; Arne Duncan and about a half dozen of the wealthiest oligarchs in the U.S. starting with Bill Gates, the Walton family and their vast propaganda machines.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

Runner Up in Biography/Autobiogrpahy
2015 Florida Book Festival

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography2014 Southern California Book Festival
2014 New England Book Festival
2014 London Book Festival

Warning! If you have high blood pressure or anger issues, don’t read this!

There is a vast difference between teaching and learning. A Teacher can teach a great lesson and the students who participate and pay attention will learn, while the students who don’t pay attention and participate don’t learn.

Do we shoot the teacher because of those children who did not cooperate and did not pay attention? And when we test 100% of the students to judge teachers and discover what they learned, there is no way to know what students cooperated with the teacher.

The reason why children who live in poverty do poorly in every country on the PISA, for instance, is because it is in this socioeconomic group where we find the most students who do not participate and cooperate with what a teacher struggles to teach them.

And this hold true in every country where the PISA tests 15-year old students. There is no exception. In fact, in January 2013, a study out of Stanford that broke down the PISA results by socioeconomic level proves this FACT. The same study was validated by the Economic Policy Institute. Here are a few key points from that study that emphasize this FACT that is being totally ignored by the corporate supported fake education reformers and the media they own and/or control, as they chase tax dollars and don’t give a fart about what children learn.

Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.

A sampling error in the U.S. administration of the most recent international (PISA) test resulted in students from the most disadvantaged schools being over-represented in the overall U.S. test-taker sample. This error further depressed the reported average U.S. test score.

If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.

This re-estimate would also improve the U.S. place in the international ranking of all OECD countries, bringing the U.S. average score to sixth in reading and 13th in math. Conventional ranking reports based on PISA, which make no adjustments for social class composition or for sampling errors, and which rank countries irrespective of whether score differences are large enough to be meaningful, report that the U.S. average score is 14th in reading and 25th in math.

Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.

U.S. students from disadvantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in the three similar post-industrial countries than advantaged U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers. But U.S. students from advantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in the top-scoring countries of Finland and Canada than disadvantaged U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers.

On average, and for almost every social class group, U.S. students do relatively better in reading than in math, compared to students in both the top-scoring and the similar post-industrial countries.

This revealing study out of Stanford has been out there for almost two years, but Arne Duncan and his master, Bill Gates—and the rest of the pack of vampires leading the charge to destroy the democratically run public schools haven’t hesitated in their relentless assault to dismantle the public schools and replace them with corporate Charters that several other Stanford studies reported are mostly worse or equal to the public schools they are replacing, and these Stanford studies were funded by the Gates foundation, so Bill Gates can’t be ignorant of the facts. Gates has to know what he is doing is perpetrating and supporting a fraud against the Citizens of the United States, and that is a federal crime that comes with a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a $10-million dollar fine.

Who is guilty without a doubt of this fraud? For sure, Bill Gates and Arne Duncan are aware that they are contributing to this fraud. Maybe Obama is just another ignorant fool, because it might be difficult to prove he’s read or heard of the results of the Stanford studies and even the Sandia report of 1990 that proved, without a doubt, that President Reagan’s A Nation at Risk was also misleading and where this fraud started.

Here’s a summary of what the Sandia Report discovered about A Nation at Risk, a fraud that has been supported by every President starting with Reagan.

“A Nation at Risk” (1983) – What the report claimed

American students are never first and frequently last academically compared to students in other industrialized nations.

American student achievement declined dramatically after Russia launched Sputnik, and hit bottom in the early 1980s.

SAT scores fell markedly between 1960 and 1980.

Student achievement levels in science were declining steadily.

Business and the military were spending millions on remedial education for new hires and recruits.

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves